LATIN DICTIONARYLexicon Latīnum
Allen & Greenough · Part First — Words and Forms › Forms of the Verb

§165. Verb-Endings

Every form of the finite verb is made up of two parts:

  • The STEM (see § 24). This is either the root or a modification or development of it.
  • The ENDING, consisting of—
  • the Signs of Mood and Tense (see §§ 168, 169).
  • the Personal Ending (see § 163).

Thus in the verb vocā-bā-s, you were calling, the root is VOC, modified into the verb-stem vocā-, which by the addition of the ending -bās becomes the imperfect tense vocābās; and this ending consists of the tense-sign bā- and the personal ending (-s) of the second person singular.

J. H. Allen and J. B. Greenough, New Latin Grammar (Boston: Ginn, 1903). Text provided under a CC BY-SA license by Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities.